Walk down Chelsea’s King’s Road today and you wouldn’t believe it used to be the sexiest, grooviest street on earth.

Well it was. In the 1960s, especially on Saturdays, it was like going to heaven without having to die first.

Fabulous looking people, outrageously beautiful clothes, very extraordinary, very this week. There had never been clothes like that, never hair like that, never people like that either.

Mary Quant, fashion designer and key 1960s figure, had been established there for a few years already in her Bazaar boutique, which inspired a thousand boutiques (every would-be-with-it shop was a boutique in the 1960s).

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Her look was as perfect as her Vidal Sassoon haircut. Didn’t she invent the skirt that she named mini after her favourite car (launched 1959)?

“It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the mini,” she says. “I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes in which you could move, run and jump and we would make them to the length the customer wanted.

I wore them very short and the customers would say ‘shorter, shorter’.” Think of Twiggy, launched on the world by the Daily Express as “the face of 1966” – a skinny working-class girl moving, running, jumping where a few years previously refined looking models had looked only ladylike.

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It was the girls on the King's Road that invented the miniskirt

For four decades it has been a home of punk and postpunk

David Robson

While almost everything else in the King’s Road long ago collapsed into the sort of normal you see everywhere, there is still one location – number 430 – that has retained its maverick power.

For four decades it has been a home of punk and postpunk – first the realm of Malcolm McLaren, creator of the Sex Pistols, and Vivienne Westwood, now Westwood alone.

In the 1960s it was London’s most frighteningly hip boutique Hung On You, almost too scarily cool to enter, then it became Mr Freedom, home of lovely crazy clothes.

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The King's Road was the trendiest street on the planet in the sixties

In 1969 I bought a blue velvet jacket there, with red stitching and bright red buttons. A fabulous thing. I still have it but of course I can’t get into it. Decades later, now well into middle age and terribly ordinary and respectable looking, I met Mr Freedom (Tommy Roberts).

I told him I’d bought a jacket from him. He perused me at a glance and said: “You don’t look like someone who would have bought a jacket from me.”

It was not meant as a compliment. Among the many thousands who will flock to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to see the enormous 1960s exhibition – You Say You Want A Revolution? Records And Rebels, 1966-1970 – that opens this week there will be many who no longer look like people who shopped at boutiques or even built their week around John Peel’s radio programmes.

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The V&A museum expect people to flock to see their sixties exhibit

Many on a déjà-vu tour, certainly the men, might prompt Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s question in his 1966 song Caroline No: “Where did your long hair go?”

On the walls as you go round the exhibition, and in racks you can riffle through, are dozens of LPs borrowed from the late John Peel’s collection.

On the headphones you get at the entrance is a soundtrack of songs from the decade. There was Sandy Shaw winning Eurovision with Puppet On A String in 1967 and all that (and Cliff) but things had moved on. Love, sex, drugs, politics, freedom, the Age of Aquarius.

There was Dylan and the Rolling Stones (still at it of course); The Kinks; The Who had released My Generation in 1965 (“Hope I die before I get old” sounds much scarier when you’re 70 than when you’re 20); Pink Floyd going on and on; Donovan, all airy-fairy; US West Coast bands being fiercely political or hippy trippy – both actually.

In America being a hippy was political. In Britain it was largely social. As in all museum exhibitions we are looking at relics: a guitar Jimi Hendrix smashed; an American astronaut’s space suit; US Left-wing political manifestos; mementoes from the wilder shores of spiritual tourism (no belief was too wacky, especially if it carried a whiff of the East); communes, which came and went.

Then there was environmentalism, which was starting to gather strength in America. “Revolution” is the V&A’s chosen title suggesting this was the decade when everything changed.

But look at John Lennon’s lyrics “You say you want a revolution?” and he’s quite sceptical about changing the world.

In any case doesn’t a revolution go 360 degrees, leaving you back where you started? In many ways that’s what happened.

What was fresh and challenging in the 1960s was gobbled up by the market and turned into commerce. The freedom the 1960s gave us is freedom to shop – no bad thing but it isn’t the Age of Aquarius.

Twiggy: Life in pictures

Revolutions, the ones that stuck and really mattered, were introduced not by the kaftan-clad but by men in suits: homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967 by home secretary Roy Jenkins; in the same year the Liberal MP David Steel introduced the bill that legalised abortion.

The feminists were on the march. Gender politics were changing. The 1970 Saatchi’s “pregnant man” ad for the Pregnancy Advisory Service (“Would you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?”) was brilliantly fresh.

Certainly the straitlaced deferential respectful British gave way to something cheekier and more challenging. But in terms of who controls power how much has really changed?

But here’s a fascinating looking thing: the boards for the Apple 1 computer developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Wozniak’s bedroom in Los Altos, California.

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In America being hippy was political

That was in 1976 and certainly the beginnings of making a difference. But perhaps nothing here is more potent than the smallest item – a Barclaycard, launched in 1966, the start of a revolution that transformed our attitude to credit for better or worse for ever.

Particularly aimed at women in its early advertising campaigns it has become a powerful instrument of liberation (or enslavement). There are things wrong with the V&A show.

It attempts to do far too much. It feels like just a load of stuff. But what stuff! And what a time it was! You don’t have to have been around to find it interesting and enjoyable but if you were you probably will.

It brought to mind a cartoon I like which shows an old bloke being offered medical care: “Wake up, it’s time for your daily dose of Van Morrison…”

The intention obviously is to attract people of all ages but I bet there will be many who make the journey to this celebration of freedom as I did – on my freedom pass